A Journey

At the end of June, my extended (and immediate) family will be spending our last family reunion at our beloved beach house, built by my grandparents in 1967. I've spent at least a week (sometimes four or five weeks) of every summer there with some of the people I love most in the world. Selling the house is an "end," but I'm reminded that every end is a beginning too; such a beautiful truth of life. As a writer, it's these transitions that invite me to remember and record.

I wrote "A Journey" in February of 2009. I think many more stories will come from my memories related to Figure Eight.

A Journey

It’s a summer month and the air-conditioner is on in the car. What does that bring to your mind? Just wait a minute. You might have something to say about summer or air-conditioning or cars.

Here’s what it brings to my mind:

That summer month could be June, July, or August—the date of the family reunion changes each year along with the topics that will lead to shouting at the “uncles’ end” of the dinner table and the number of tattoos on my cousin Tim’s body. Once school ended, my brothers and sisters and I began a countdown on a whiteboard in the kitchen until we left for the beach. Each day, Joseph would subtract one from the number in the top left corner, erase it, and rewrite the new number with a dry erase marker that usually was dried out or lost within a couple weeks.

If it’s before my two youngest brothers Robert and Joseph were born, the car is a seven-seater, burgundy Toyota Previa (a van my dad preserved with steadfast love through last year while we kids grew to hate it for its loud shaking at stoplights and out-dated jelly-bean shape). The air-conditioner is probably blasting air on my older sister Katie and me with such force that our bangs are blown back with a few strands pasted to our foreheads. And the three youngest, John, Jane, and Thomas, are most likely sweating and complaining that they aren’t getting any air in the back.

Or if all seven kids have been born, the car’s a white Chevy Suburban. Nine Helds fill the three rows, three of us to a row. We better keep our hands to ourselves and feet in front of us or else someone’s gonna lose it (that someone usually being Jane with her red hair and hatred of another’s skin rubbing against her own). The vents are broken so cool air is a front-seat luxury for Dad-Joe-Mom. And the six, sitting in the heat behind them, want to roll down the windows and let the air beat against their eardrums; well, at least that’s what I wish for.

The car exits the highway—just a few more miles until we reach the beach. Can you remember a time when you went to the beach? Exited a highway? Just wanted to be where you were going?

I remember how the drive to Figure Eight Island used to take four hours until a new highway was built. Interstate 40 to US-17 makes the drive three hours and thirty minutes. Forget the discomfort of being in a hot car; I miss the extra thirty minutes that meant taking back roads where the sand made the pavement shimmer and where the colors of the local fruit stands—the bright yellow of bananas and the green of the watermelons we’d sometimes stop and buy—were the signs that the beach was close. A quietness would fill the car then until the old Exxon at the corner of Market and Porters Neck.

Once we turned off of Porters Neck onto Edgewater, one of us (I think my mom was the first to initiate the tradition) would begin to sing, “We’re going to the beach….” We’d all join in: “We’re going to the beach! Hi-ho, the dairy-o, we’re going to the beach!” until the sharp curve as Edgewater became Bridge. “Shhhhh.” We could now see the bridge to the island, arching over water we’d soon be tubing and boating in.

Now when we get off the highway, there’s the Exxon, but across from it is a shopping center that opened around the time the beach house behind ours was built. That beach house is where our view of the marshes used to be and is elevated by a mound of sand brought in with trucks so the owner’s view of the ocean would not be blocked by our house.

I love the grocery store runs I make to the shopping center’s Harris Teeter with Aunt Topsy or mom or Katie and Jane. Their watermelons are always on sale if you use a VIC card.

We’ve reached 240 Beach Road North before any of the other extended family. This memory is mine. I have at least a hundred versions of it. I’ll share one with you, the one I hope I have for forever. Stop me if you remember any of it:

That moment of pulling up to the grey beach house to the sound of gravel under the tires, with the smell of salt air and the knowledge that the paved pathway with puddles when it rains, ending at the stairs that go up to the front door, will lead to the longed-for glimpse of the ocean; then, the pull on the screen door that gets stuck and the climb up the wooden stairs to the kitchen and you coming around the black counter and Granddad getting up from his chair at the long table with a bowl of shells in the middle to hug all nine Helds in succession.

Now you have lost your ability to stand in the kitchen and cook dinner; for a while, you lost your desire to come upstairs at all.

Now you love to be with us at dinner but your dementia means you’re not sure who you are eating with or if you’ve ever had the meal before.

I love that you love banana ice cream.

Mamie, the doctors say you will lose most of your memories. For you, I’ll try to keep as many as I can.